Retrospective 2019 with Sid Stone

2019 was a busy travel and photography year for Sidney and his partner Joanna. During 2019 they traveled to Nova Scotia, Palm Springs, Vermont, Australia and Philadelphia. Some of the travel was related to Jo’s job and Sidney got to tag along getting a lot of free time to explore the locals and take pictures.

Sidney will take us back to the “normal” days of 2019 and perhaps add a few shots from his younger days.

Sidney has been photographing seriously since about the age of 9 starting as many did with a Kodak Brownie. Although he recalls taking some pictures with his father’s Kodak Bantam camera that used 828 film. Sidney still has that camera. His love of darkroom work was triggered as he watched his father develop prints in a make shift kitchen darkroom. He thought it was magic to see an image appear on white paper placed in a tray of chemicals. This love of the darkroom led to countless hours spent in darkrooms at his high school, college, apartment with the window covered, a kitchen, a converted bathroom, and basement darkrooms.

One of Sidney’s particular photography loves is shooting sports. In high school and college is was an official school sports photographer shooting football, baseball, swimming, golf, basketball (nothing better than sitting on the hardwood under the basket!). When his son Dan became his high school’s football manager Sidney spent Saturday afternoons walking the sidelines and end zones snapping action shots. After shooting about 20 rolls of Ektachrome each game, getting it processed and scanned he went digital choosing Canon over Nikon. He still has his original Minolta SR-1 and has been recently shooting with it.

Geometrical Shapes with Kathryn Mohrman

“Geometry is the foundation of all painting,” said Albrecht Durer, the famous painter and printmaker of the German Renaissance. In fact, geometry is the foundation of all forms of art, from sculpture to photography. Almost any artistic work can be analyzed in terms of curves and straight lines, ovals and rectangles.

The photographs in this exhibit emphasize the fundamental geometry of architecture. My eye is drawn to the shapes of bridges and facades and domes and stairways. As I travel in various countries I am attracted to the people, of course, but also to the monuments they have created in stone and steel and glass. From New York City to Istanbul, Ireland to Uzbekistan, I marvel at the creativity of various cultures across the centuries as they combine various shapes in their buildings in different and intriguing ways.

Kathryn Mohrman became seriously interested in photography about a decade ago, when she received her first “real” digital camera for a safari in Botswana. She then became fascinated by the options available with manual controls instead of automatic–and the rest is history.

She joined NVPS in 2015 when she retired from a career in academia. She has served as secretary/historian of the club and has participated in various anonymous critiques and member displays.

Her work has emphasized the different cultures she has visited in her travels around the world, although this exhibit does not have humans in any of the images. In recent months her travels and photography have been limited to locations close to home, but she has used her time productively with online classes and webinars on Photoshop, creativity, and compositing.